Philip Roth - Letting Go

“You were always a lively, affectionate fella, Paul, and you know it. You were the kind of fella who you could just see someday playing with his own kids, tossing them up in the air and taking them to Ebbets Field and the whole works. You were a very affectionate fella, Paul.”

“Well,” he said, unable to remember where he had put his suitcase, and growing more furious by the moment, “maybe it turns out I’m a cold fish. Maybe that’s my story.”

But Doris was shaking her head. “You were always kissing me, Paul,” she said. “That’s something that if you do it, you have it all your life. I’m still a very affectionate person, I can tell you that. Maury says I’m sometimes too demonstrative even.”

Where was the suitcase? “Doris, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And you,” she said, heartbroken, her hands on her hips, “you were the smartest of any of us.”

It was time to go. Go, you coward. Your suitcase is right at your feet. Go.

Where?

“Where are you going — where?” she called after him as he started down the hall. “Paul?” she called, but he had no answer. As he opened the door to the elevator she shouted to him “Paul, you’re a fool. Oh Paul, you ruined your life!” It was only another voice in the chorus.

At home, whenever eggs were served for breakfast, he served them. It was not that Libby couldn’t crack an egg properly, or even that she was unwilling to; it was simply that the way they had worked out their life together, he usually slipped from his side of the bed in the morning while she was asleep — at any rate, while her eyes were closed. Only occasionally, out of exhaustion or a lingering sense of the fitness of things, they lay side by side in bed, wide awake; and then he was compelled — still out of a fingering sense of the fitness of things, of what was only just and right — to make the ultimate expression of that connection which husbands and wives are said to have, and which he and his wife no longer had — perhaps never had — and which therefore made the expression of it a hypocrisy beyond any hypocrisy he could ever have imagined. It was not very pleasant to start the day caught somewhere between the betrayal of your marriage — the very convention of marriage itself — and the betrayal of your own flesh. Nor to end it that way; as a result they did not often go to bed at the same hour either.

The butter melting, the eggshell splitting, the plop, the sizzle, all brought back to him (as though they ever left him) the realities of his home life.

From the far end of the room, Asher called, “Up — over? Which?”

“Up.”

No longer was the El outside Asher’s window, and the sun, allowed access, cast a glow on the stiff curved leaves of the potted plants that circled the room. The floors, walls, and furniture, however, hadn’t gained much from the alteration in the city’s landscape. As for Asher, El or no El, light or half-light, he looked the same; nose, pores, hair, belly, aroma, everything was just six years older.

“How is that weather in Chicago?” he called.

“Now it’s spring,” Paul answered.

“Hot, huh?”

“Yes, hot.”

“There’s a city that’s got a climate for you. Takes all that crap from Canada, all that ice and wind, and then whshsh, those summers. My hair dropped out of my head there, Paulie, from humidity alone.”

“I forget you were a Chicagoan.”

“All that clamminess and police corruption,” Asher called from the kitchen, “produces baldness early. Either you’re perspiring into your hatband or worrying to death.” He was crossing the room, the pan in one hand, the other hand drawing a bead on his nephew’s hairline. “Ah, but you’re not doing so bad yet yourself. In fact, you look nice, Paul. You got a nice grave expression in your face. Second violinist for the Krakow Philharmonic.” He slid the egg onto the plate Paul held out to him, then sat down, the pan dangling from his hand.

Paul was feeling now the kind of relief he had felt at first at Doris’s. He was willing to accept the fact that he had made one false start this morning already. Now he understood things better; on the subway back from Brooklyn he had come to grips with the meaning of his trip. “Thanks,” he said to Asher. Asher smiled; even he was a help. He had opened the door, shaken hands, and when Paul asked if there was a bed he might use for a night or two, Asher had pointed over to the sofa, no questions asked — at least not right then.

“You look in the eyes,” Asher said, “like you’ve been having some of life’s more classical experiences.”

Having brought a bite of egg to his mouth, Paul set it down; he waited out the nausea that reached up from his stomach. “I didn’t get much sleep on the train,” he said.

“Oh, sure, well”—Asher moved out of his chair and pulled up on the high stool beside his drawing board—“that explains everything.”

“But you’re the same, Asher,” said Paul wryly, and tried once again to eat. He told himself he had nothing to worry about. He had found a neutral bed in which to sleep; he could proceed as planned.

“Oh I manage to maintain a nice lofty attitude,” said Asher.

“You’ve seen my father?”

Those wrinkled lids of Asher’s, magnified behind his glasses, came down over his eyes, telling all. “From the hallway.”

“And my mother?”

“You want me to give you a little chronicle of hysteria, or you want to go on past performances?”

“She mentions me?”

“Paul, there’s nothing she won’t mention. She’s a dredger of polluted waters. She was never too sharp at sorting out forests from trees.”

But he might as well hear it all; that too could give strength. “What does she say about me?”

“I thought you had an imaginative spirit.”

He took another mouthful, and saw no reason not to confide in his uncle, not when the man wanted to be helpful. “I’m not going to see him, Asher. I can’t do it. It doesn’t make sense, given my life. I came all the way here to New York because … I don’t know precisely.” That much he could keep to himself. “I went over to Brooklyn this morning.”

“I figured.”

“It cost me a round trip from Chicago that I can’t even afford. Asher, I ask you, do I owe them anything?”

Asher wasn’t even willing to take the question seriously. “Nobody owes nobody nothing.”

“Not when they ate my guts out,” Paul said, and found appetite for his breakfast.

Asher was tapping his forehead with his fingers. “You think too much in conditions. Same old story, you miss the point.”

“And I’m leaving my wife,” said Paul, because he had to finally, because that was the corollary: He would not see his father. He would leave Libby. Though two sentences were needed to convey the information, he saw it as only one act, arising out of some new direction of the will. He was moving instinctively toward an unburdening. Even deciding — instinctively again — to come to Asher’s seemed somehow a part of it. “It’s beyond choice,” he said, and felt better than at any moment in the last twenty-four hours.

Asher blinked several times, as though watching Paul’s words fall into the proper slots. “No kidding,” he said.

Nausea reached up a quick hand for the freshly ingested egg. Paul swallowed. “That’s what it looks like,” he said.

“She sleeps around?” Asher asked. “She doesn’t keep the place straightened up nice?”

“You’re just the same, Asher.”

“You went away a few years, you think everybody went all over the place taking courses in tact, awaiting your homecoming?”